Reach for “The End Zone”: Hartnett and Rockwell Cast in Football Flick

Josh Hartnett and Sam Rockwell have been cast in the upcoming adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1971 novel End Zone. Dark Horizons says that, “Hartnett is playing a gifted running back who is fumbling his attempts to acclimate to stardom. Rockwell plays the school’s excitable publicist.” (Put money on Hartnett fumbling in general; he’s officially on my list of “people I don’t even want to see near the roster of my fantasy team. Not to mention that he hasn’t made a decent movie in about forever.) Kat Denning is the love interest and “yet to be cast is a teacher of international terrorism and mass destruction who sees the running back as the perfect soldier/student.” Suggestions? I vote for Christopher Walken. Why not?

As for the book–I plead guilty to not having read it (hey, I read Underworld, okay?), but it’s described on Amazon.com as a “heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Hartnett Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory.” They also call it a “cross between Dr. Strangelove and North Dallas Forty.”

I have to say, it sounds all very Cold War and very ’70s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…well, there is if the writers, directors, etc. don’t have some way of making it either hilarious and/or relevant. Right now it sounds like it’s better on paper than on film. Good luck.